On my project, Mint, I have reached a point, where the code is mostly stable and decided to start looking for ways to improve the performance. I checked out various JavaScript profiling techniques, deciding that the Firebug profiler was probably the most accurate. I then started profiling the different pages and realized (to my surprise) that a lot of time spent in the YAHOO.util.Dom.hasClass method. I use getElementsByClass method a lot, so this method is hit frequently. Therefore, since hasClass was used the most, any performance improvement to that method would generally improve the performance of Mint.

So what is taking a long time here? creating and executing the regular expression.

How do I improve this? replace the regex with something faster or find a way to create something that is already instantiated before this method is hit

I first choose to replace the regular expression (regex) with a call to split method, of String, on the DOMElements className. I noticed about a 0.5 millisecond (ms) response time improvement to the execution time of the hasClass method and almost a 0.1 ms improvement to the whole function stack. The 0.05 ms improvement is because converting the className into an array using split is that faster than creating a new regex. Also, the execution of batch and f Functions are improved a combined 0.05 ms, because executing the indexOf method on a small array is faster than test method of the regex. So, replacing the regex with an array does improve the execution time by a reasonable amount. It will be hard to notice the improved performance on any data set < 1000, however, it is always faster, so you are not hurting by using this change with smaller data sets.

I compiled all my tests into Table 1A. The table shows the ms of owned time (time the execution thread was actually in that method) that each function had. I setup a simple page with 3 div elements, one without a class, one with a single class, and one with several classes. I then grabbed one element at a time and executed hasClass on it 1000 times. I did this 5 times, then took the average of those runs and recorded it as a trial. So each trial consists of 5000 calls to hasClass. I then modified the hasClass method and repeated. hasClass calls batch, which calls the f Function, so I have included their owned time as well. I did not throw out outliers as I was only proving that the Array method is faster than the Regex method and not trying to accurately estimate how much faster.

Something this data shows that warrants further investigation is: why does indexOf method execute marginally faster on an array with a single element versus an Array with no elements? If you look at the average runtime of the f Function using the new method, the runtime of f is slightly higher when there is no class than when there is one. I produced two more sets of data for each case and got comparable results.

I would have liked to try an approach that moves the instantiation completely out of the method, but I couldnt think of a good technique. If you have any ideas how to further improve this, let me know.